Aether

I’m very excited to introduce Aether, a Pokémon type calculator for iOS.
Aether is a simple app, built with the aim of doing one thing, and doing it well. It lets you quickly and easily check Pokémon type matchups to see how effective they’ll be during battle.

Background

I’ve been an avid Pokémon player for almost as long as I can remember. I was 6 or 7 when I received my first GameBoy Color and Pokémon Yellow, instantly hooking me into that world, and keeping me there through the Ruby and Sapphire games. I didn’t own a Nintendo DS when they arrived on the scene, so I stopped playing for a few years, until the release of Sun and Moon. In that interim, the first new Pokemon type was introduced since the second generation of games; Fairy. And I’ve never been able fully internalise its various strengths and weaknesses. (You could say I struggle to “cache them all” in my head.)

I frequently find myself Googling Pokémon type matchups, inevitably creating a bunch of tabs I forget to close, and I realised that an app might be a nicer approach to this. At the very least it would save me typing out the names of each type every time I need to check it’s chart.

I looked on the App Store, and found the available options pretty lacklustre, and figured, hey, that seems like something I could build in a weekend. It ended up taking a little longer than that, but compared to other my projects, this was a very quick turnaround.

And that’s how Aether came to be.

The Name

I always like to pick a clever and relevant name for my projects, so I did some digging on things like Rock, Paper, Scissors (Rochambeau was my favourite name before Aether), and concepts of Game Theory and balancing (Libra?), before exploring our early scientific understanding of the elements. In some cultures earth, water, fire and air (long ago the four nations lived in harmony…) were considered the fundamental building blocks of nature, and I liked the obvious ties to the Pokémon types.

Aether was considered the fifth element (no, not Love), representing when the stars and heavenly bodies were made of. It’s a cool word, and has a nice tie to the item in the Pokémon games, Ether, which is used to restore your Pokémon ability to use attacks after battle.

The App

If you’re familiar with my main app, Obscura, you can probably tell that I’m a big fan of dials as an interface element. They’re both a fun and efficient way to present a long list of options to the user. Combined with the iPhone’s haptics, they’re very satisfying to use.

So Aether is composed of three dials, one for the type of the offensive Pokémon’s move, and two for the type of the defending Pokémon (many Pokémon are dual-type, and both go into calculating the effectiveness of a move against them). You can also hide the second defending type if you just want to see single type matchups.

At the bottom of the screen the effectiveness is displayed. Simple, right?

I hope that it’s pretty self-explanatory. The app supports Dark Mode, Dynamic type, and has both a light and dark App Icon.

Maybe you’re a returning fan like myself, or maybe you just need a little help understanding what on earth your kids are talking about. If so, I hope you check out, and enjoy Aether.